Juvenilia as art has usually worked in the favor of cinephiles like Tarantino, who base their efforts on an aesthetics of pastiche, referentiality, and prepackaged iconography. Juvenilia -- I mean intellectualized juvenilia -- manages to make quick clever use of an increasing variety of terms, styles, and imagery to convey, sometimes insipidly, sometimes ingeniously, the relevancy of the pop world to high art. The popular culture derives its components from iconic representations -- 'archetypes' if you will -- of certain ineluctably superficial attitudes to, and spirits informing, the over-informed life, the life vested in polyphony: Marilyn Monroe will represent both classical beauty and pornography, she is the ageless Venus, clothed, unclothed; Chaplin embodies the soldier of humor, he is wit's walking shadow; Hitler, no longer a living breathing imperfect man real to us as he had been flesh-and-blood to the people -- now among us the dead -- who loved and hated him, has ballooned into a caricature of unmitigated evil; he may as well carry three 6s tattooed under his shaved armpit to complete the portrait. It is no use to think of these personages as anything but the single-term icons they evoke: like household gods and demons -- however complex their ontological histories may be -- they are present to us only when we invoke them by their vocation, their specific and singular attributes. We will gladly masturbate to Marilyn, and dream of blowing to bits Adolph's grim visage. The juvenile mind has the nearly religious capacity to invoke all the known gods at a whim -- or the One God in a prayer -- because the aged child's mind is more so credulous than skeptical (skepticism being the first -- though not the last -- sign of maturity, of discernment). The juvenile mind is more prone to excited worship than agnosticism, and it puts up posters of its rock stars, sports heroes, and pop idols on the walls of the room in which it plays, alone and satisfied, with the toys of thoughtful infancy. (I envision young cerebral Quentin making machine-gun sounds with his mouth, as he tumbles the figurine of Skeletor with his hand, a poster of Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly looking imperiously above him.)
Juvenilia as praxis empowers and legitimizes popular culture because it takes the controlling spirit of Pop -- which takes form as an aggressive, advanced irony -- and leavens its pretension, makes it unpretentious, palatable, and also ceremonial. Juvenilia can work thusly as both a serious gesture and a non-serious gesture. Because it is not taken seriously to begin with, it can go ahead and speak ultraistic statements, baffle the elitist gate-keepers of kulchur, and spend a fortnight painting the monochrome town of high-seriousness a red so black that it oozes deoxygenated blood.
One very original review of Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds, brings to mind the power that juvenilia has when confronting the old beasts of history. Critics of culture, who tend by nature to canonize the old accepted forms and shun the technological, have severely underestimated the influence and parallelism that video games have had and shared with film as of late; if in the beginning films heavily contributed to the way that video games are designed (for they play more like movies now than like Super Mario Bros, with a lot of gameplay relegated to graphics-heavy preludes, interludes, and postludes breaking up the priority of the controller to manage the plotline), then it is now the case that video games have completely usurped the future of film by forcing film to simulate the interactive relationship games have with the player/viewer. (Not wishing to fly off into other tangents -- for the subject requires more than a few essays to deal with-- but the new graphics-laden films made and being made by directors like Darren Aronofsky, Robert Zemeckis, and James Cameron -- to name an illustrious few -- are indeed drifting into the aesthetics of video game design).
What the review -- written by Michael K., my comrade-in-arms -- makes a great point of is how eerily similar Tarantino's fantasia of killing Nazis with moral impunity is to the ID Software game, Wolfenstein 3D, the landmark 1992 game that paved the way for Doom and the 1st Person Shooter genre. That a video game should share verisimilitude with a Tarantino film is unsurprising; that both should resonate with the new pop-fried generation confronting improbable monsters like Adolph Hitler is all the more intriguing:
Project Kill Nazi Redemption
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Without a doubt, when considered with his last offering -- the abysmal, meretricious Death Proof -- Inglourious Basterds is quite the resurgence, replacing him in the shining auteur spotlight that was lavished on him after the release of Pulp Fiction (incidentally, the master thesis on film as pop culture). Inglourious is the film that he has been promising to make since the early days of his fame, a film that is in some ways more personal than the Kill Bill volumes (works in which he attempted, for ostensibly technical reasons, to emulate the kinetic mastery of the chinese kung fu school); and, if one were to consider the reverential attitude of filmmaking at play, the slow-grind dialogue and pacing that make up the 'dramatic' parts of Inglourious are as 'mature' as those that made the romance of Jackie Brown poignant. Inglourious may also be more a summation of Tarantino's arch loves, of his education as a cinephile, than his other films. It is firstly a homage to Sergio Leone (evoked so belovedly in the first setpiece), and to the italian school in general, particularly the B-grade masters like Enzo Castellari and Argento (to whom, I feel, Tarantino owes the tone of the final 'infernal' revenge sequence); it is, secondly, a confrontation with Germany as a culture older than the 3rd Reich, greater in its spirit than in the demagogues of that time. (Tarantino is no apologist, but he makes shrewd distinctions between film geist and film ideology, as evinced in the suspensefully-shot german tavern scene, in which two interpretations of King Kong are unpleasantly trotted out: to the Nazi, it is a shrilly farcical story of slavery; to the cinephile, a masterpiece of tragedy and spectacle.)
Thirdly -- and encompassing the whole aesthetic impulse at work -- Inglourious is Tarantino's settlement with what european cinema means to him, at bottom, those parts that were authentic to him, which catered to both his adult sense and to his juvenile taste; it is the record of what he has kept and treasured from his tangential european education, in the same way that Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown are condensations of his american heritage, and how the Kill Bill films are reservoirs of his sino-japanese film erudition. This may be one reason why Inglourious took him so long to make (beyond the logistics and budget required to enact it; the script had been in mind and hand even before he made Jackie Brown): of the film traditions he grew up with, the european film tradition is one that, in terms of unalloyed erudition, demands the most. Cinephiles pride themselves on the obscurities they obtain from East and South East Asia, Far Eastern Europe, and from the over-rich American Independent scene; but Western Europe, in its obstinate classicism, presents numerous problems for a director as happily juvenile and as doggedly trash-loving as Tarantino; there was no foreseeable entrypoint except through the all-too-obvious gateways of the established european pastmasters -- Fellini, Bergman, Bunuel, Truffaut, etc. -- those directors who everyone swooned over, but whom Tarantino -- a clear-cut example of the obscure-record nerd -- deemed too well-known to mimic.
So the structure of the script followed in suit with what would pass as a clandestine Allied offensive: (1) penetrate Europe through the subterranean films of Italia, Tarantino's primal love, and the namesake that marked his career -- then, (2) proceed through the early german masters, Riefenstahl, G.W. Pabst, Fritz Lang, etc., as a way of infiltrating enemy lines, by both Tarantino the film-auteur and by the jewish protag, the ice-blooded Shoshanna Dreyfus; -- afterwards, (3) gloss over british cool for a bit, drink scotch and wax cockney-poetic, while maintaining an american presence in the Tennessee-born character, Lt. Aldo Raine -- played by Brad Pitt -- who also stands for its Knoxville-born director, coincidentally. At last, after a convergence of strange heroes with stranger allies -- american jews with italo-americans, american hillbillies with german defectors -- (4) return to italian giallo standards, replicate the locked death-chambers of the concentration camps, and go out in a blaze of sound and fury, of fire and brimstone, death by nitrate celluloid. One use of film is to preserve history and make a record of aesthetic ideas; but in the alternate universe created by the Inglourious Basterds, film can be used to destroy, to avenge, to redeem the ideological misuse of film.
Tarantino is no hero's hero, and discernment, decorum, and moral ambivalence are traits that don't interest him when he makes a film, especially one modeled on italian westerns and blood-drenched war films. Tarantino, a master of intellectualized juvenilia, perhaps sees himself in the role of a southern-twanged Lieutenant guiding the new world jews -- the jews he grew up with and watched films with -- to a revenge worthy of a fabulous video game, worthy of the O.G. Bastards he cheered for, in all their sublime immorality.
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